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Monthly Archives: May 2012

Mmm mmm mmm! This ice, ice cream, blueberry, cheese, red bean and wine flavouring treat makes for a great summer treat. Irony being that it was dark and rainy when we had it! These are offered at the many, many coffee shops you come across as well as fast food places like Lotteria and Burger King. I think this will be a great alternative to Macs’ slushies in the summer.

Korean pizza, as I have heard it been called, is awesome! It has onions, hot peppers, squid, and carrot in savory pancake batter. You break it apart by using your chopsticks like knives and slide them across the pizza from one side to the other. Delicious!

This was an interesting street food find. (He looks unimpressed, but he did like it!)You find many many tents with food set up along walking streets and near the subway stations. This bite sized snack caught Sandy’s eyes and nose while we were walking around Seoul. It was a sweet cake/bread with an egg (with a noticeably large yolk) broiled on top. Tasty and another example of how some of the ingredients we keep strictly savoury in Canada are combined with sweet here.

And here is some 닭갈비 dak galbi, a favourite dish of mine, at the beginning of the simmering process. They bring the chicken, red pepper sauce, cabbage, sweet potato and 떡tteok (a chewy rice cake that is kind of similar to very thick pasta) uncooked and it simmers away on the table oven until it is ready! Quite spicy, but amazing!!

In some areas of Osan the restaurants close relatively early, around 8 for some places. After that, you have to go to a 호프 hof to get food. A hof is a pub/bar that serves drinks and 안주 anju. We had an interesting dish a couple weekends ago.

That is a hof fruit platter (with a yogurt sauce)! Notice that there are olives and tomatos. Tomatos are totally treated as the fruit that they are whereas in Canada they are seen and used more as vegetables. The olives… not sure about that one.

Anyways, a fruit platter is not something you would generally expect of a pub, but a pleasant surprise as one bad thing about hofs is that they don’t really have meals but just pub snack food like fried chicken and fries which makes for a rather unhealthy dinner. We had originally ordered two deep fried dishes but the server came back and suggested that those choices had ‘too much oil’ to be consumed whilst enjoying a brewsky. You may be thinking, “What? Greasy food is the right choice for a pub!” Well, many dishes are served with specific types of alcohol in mind and, as I understand, greasy food is often paired with soju (a popular rice alcohol), not beer. So, she suggested a fruit platter, and what a good suggestion that was! Mmmmm, delicious fruit.

Now, if only we could read Korean and could see what other healthy dishes are on those menus! ‘till then, we will stick with golden deep fried goodness!

For another edition of Around Osan I present: FRESH fresh seafood restaurants. Walking in restaurant areas of town you will see a number of these places that are made so distinct because of the big tanks out front.

There is one place right near where we walk to work, so I always look to see what kinds of new fish they have as the big tanks change regularly. This past week, we were in for an unusual surprise; in the process saying “oh look, there is a really big fish today” I realised… that’s no regular fish. My exclamation developed into, “oh look, there is… a shark!” Wow.

I won’t go into the ethics of all of this as that conversation is for a different space aside from a travel blog, but I will say that if his fate is to be eaten, I hope he gets eaten soon so he can get out of that small tank!

I’ll leave you with a pic from a different restaurant than the above mentioned and pictured. At this place, the tanks were lit at night and made for a pretty effect!

Here is the park across the street from our hogwan that is transforming into a beautiful space with its new leaves and blooms.

The park lies between two apartment buildings and is actually smaller than these pics suggest.

We were not expecting so much beauty in our community but there are lots of flowering bushes and great young trees. While I could not find any information online, my understanding is that Osan is trying to market itself as a green city – aesthetically pleasing as well as environmentally sound – which is why there are many trees and parks.

AND, just for fun, here is a picture of a guy playing arcade darts (or arcadarts as Sandy so creatively said…. awkward). Kinda a cool alternative to Buck Hunter.

Saturday night we went to a Meetup Korea event, a place to meet people – foreign and Korean – in this area of the country. Had a lot of fun!

Sunday we enjoyed a leisurely morning. We wanted to check out the shopping so walked down the famous 테헤란로 Teheran Boulevard, one of the busiest roads in South Korea.

Apart from the street itself and all the people, there were a number of other great things that caught our eye. There were a couple of really cool looking buildings. Here is one I got on camera as well as some street-side art.

Sorry for the delay in posting! Hope to make it up this weekend!! For now, here is a peak at what we did last weekend!

Saturday we headed into Seoul, this time taking the bus. It was approximately 45 minutes, and this time we were able to sit. The view wasn’t anything too special but there were a couple of girls inside the bus that seemed to think the view inside the bus was pretty great. Sandy and I both heard someone’s camera phone clicking away and were confused as to what they could possibly be taking pictures of. Turns out, it was Sandy! Mr. Handsome had a couple of admirers!

After running away from that debacle, we found ourselves in Gangnam, an affluent financial district in Seoul that has plenty of shopping, dining and entertainment to choose from.

But before we were to take in Gangnam, we had other plans in mind. We hopped on the subway and headed to the National Assembly building. We were not, however, interested in politics. Behind the building there is a road famous for cherry trees and we wanted to see the cherry blossoms. Understand that it was last weekend that Seoul held their blossom festival and it had rained and we had heard that probably, all the blossoms would have been knocked off the trees by the rain. But I had really been looking forward to seeing the trees so we decided to check it out, maybe there were some left! This is what we found.

There is the famous road and there are the trees… and there is the lack of blossoms….